New Lenovo? The old one has no recommendation from me.

See, that is the new cool at the blogosphere: You write about that your son is wanting one of the new laptop thingies and Phillip Torrone offers to etch a motive on it for you.

Well, I have such a little nuts as my own brother (everything Apple makes is by default beautiful) but that is okay as long as he does some jobs for me on his G5 for me. ;))

Also in the comments of that post and in Robert’s post was a sentence which grabbed my attention – it seems to be as if a new Lenovo Thinkpad is on the way. This reminded me of giving you an update on my tablet, which is one of the first Thinkpad Tablet PC.

I thought about it for a while back when somebody ask me about “which tablet should I buy” and I only could show him mine – and made sure he understood the disadvantages of my Lenovo X41. And there are a lot. Yes, it does have wifi and bluetooth, many slots and such, but there are some downsides which make me not recommend the Lenovo anymore.

A tablet pc itself? Yes. A thinkpad if you do not want a tablet? Perhaps. For example the keyboard: It is great. When I type english posts. But not when I do write german ones – because the umlauts are only half keys together with +#. And I am desperately missing the windows key. Yes, I do use it.

There are no mics on the screen, so phoning just with the tablet is not possible and the built in mic does not pick up anything good besides hard disk noise. Speakers are at the bottom of the laptop, so you have to crank it up really loud and can not have it on your lap while typing.
It adds up. The digitizer is not as responsive as I want it to be and needs recalibration very often. It does only have a few buttons on the tablet side, so it is not very easy to use it just in that mode. And many more things.

There are many more things, small things which annoy me. Yes, it still is a good notebook, but it is missing some features I am seeing in other tablets. So from my point of view this has switched from “ooooh, new toy” to “okay tablet”, but nothing more.

But should you buy a tablet? Definitely. And at least most of the machines are not as expensive as Macs. Wonder how Scoble’s son wants to finance his possible new notebook as he only has a third saved? Well, advertisement of course:

unless Dad’s going to pony up $1,300 :-) then I’ll be glad to cover my Macbook with Microsoft stickers.

*g* Patrick, make a contract on time and make sure you have something to remove them. Then, after the sensation of that wears of (aka when your licencing term with your Dad about how long you run those is over), make a ‘relaunch’ with that nice etched logo. ;o)

About Nicole SImon

I specialize in Tactics, turning 'Social Media bullshit' into reality, meaning I am working with clients on how to use these tools properly (setup, workflows, procedures, etc) including analysis and assessments. I often advise and mentor startups. I live in Berlin.